Bombing of Dresden (1945)

Over two days and nights in February 1945, British and American heavy bombers attacked Dresden, the capital of Saxony in eastern Germany, setting off a firestorm that gutted its historic centre. In four raids between 13 and 15 February, some 1,300 bombers dropped more than 3,900 tons of bombs. A commission of historians appointed by the city concluded in 2010 that up to 25,000 people were killed. The attack, coming in the last months of the Second World War, became one of the most debated Allied actions of the conflict.

By early 1945 Nazi Germany was retreating on all fronts, and the Red Army had crossed the Oder within about 70 kilometres of Berlin. The Allies were nonetheless uncertain how long German resistance might last. In late January, prompted in part by Winston Churchill, the British Air Staff asked Bomber Command to strike Berlin, Dresden, Leipzig and Chemnitz, eastern cities whose railways carried troops and supplies to the front and through which refugees were fleeing west. An American inquiry later stated that the Soviets, under Allied agreements to support their offensive from the air, had asked for such attacks. American reports later described Dresden as a major rail and communications hub with over a hundred factories serving the war effort; critics have argued it was above all a cultural landmark of limited military value.

On the night of 13 February, bad weather having grounded the Americans, RAF Bomber Command opened the attack. Pathfinder aircraft marked the old town with flares, and from 22:13 some 244 Lancasters dropped high explosives to blow open roofs and windows, followed by incendiaries. A second, larger wave arrived three hours later, when more than 500 Lancasters bombed areas around the spreading fires. The combination produced a firestorm that destroyed more than 1,600 acres of the city centre.

Around midday on 14 February, 316 American B-17s bombed Dresden, many aiming by radar through cloud and smoke, so that bombs were scattered widely; the following day further American bombers, diverted from their primary target, struck the city again. Rail traffic through Dresden resumed within days. Claims that Allied fighters strafed civilians were later examined by German historians, who found no reliable evidence for them.

The city authorities of 1945 counted over 20,000 recovered dead by late March and expected a final total of about 25,000. The city's independent commission of historians, set up in 2005 partly to counter the misuse of the bombing by the far right, reported in 2010 a toll of between 22,700 and 25,000. Between 100,000 and 200,000 refugees are thought to have been in the city, but because most victims suffocated rather than burned, the count is considered reliable to within about a hundred.

Far larger numbers circulated for decades. Joseph Goebbels's propaganda ministry presented Dresden as a defenceless city of culture, and in March 1945 the German government had its press publish a falsified toll of 200,000; claims of up to 500,000 were later made. East Germany's communist government used the raid as an example of "Anglo-American barbarism". In the West, the British writer and Holocaust denier David Irving popularised a figure of 135,000, since described as inflated; according to the historian Frederick Taylor, the falsified figures also fed outrage in neutral countries and even in the British Parliament.

In Britain, unease followed quickly. On 28 March 1945 Churchill drafted a memo describing the destruction of Dresden as "a serious query against the conduct of Allied bombing", though he softened the final version. Defenders, including an American inquiry, judged the city a defended military target attacked by normal means; critics consider the raids disproportionate area bombing, and some call them a war crime. Since the war, Dresden has rebuilt many landmarks, and the Frauenkirche, left as a ruin under East German rule, was reconsecrated in 2005 with British help.

Our 1938 map shows Dresden within Nazi Germany before the war, and our 1945 map shows it in defeated, occupied Germany; after the war the city lay in East Germany.